Back to the youth club scene in Kilnamona

HUNDREDS of people, almost all the children of the parish between 1967 and 2006, have been members of Kilnamona Youth Club. This weekend they will celebrate their shared experience in the Old Ground Hotel for a reunion celebrating four decades of the organisation.

“The youth club was founded in 1967 and it continued until 2006. There were stops and starts in between but it managed to keep going mainly because of Fr Sean Sexton who had trained as a youth worker in Britain. When talking to people in the parish, they would often say ‘we should have a reunion’ and it is the year of The Gathering so Saturday is that,” said Eileen Breen, one of the reunion organisers.

The reunion includes screenings of DVDs of plays and performances the club was involved in, as well as an exhibition of photographs, projects, yearbooks and trophies.

“We have loads of memorabilia from the club. We used to enter the club-of-the-year competition every year and to do that, we had to submit a book showing the things we were involved in, so we have lots of information on the projects members did during that time. We have lots of photographs too. We scanned about 1,500 of them. We wouldn’t have that many from the 1960s and 1970s but we have a lot from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. So some of them will be on display in the room upstairs in the Old Ground on Saturday. One of the people who was involved in the club, who is very technical, has interviewed about 10 people and put together a history of the youth club and it is really more of a series of stories on DVD, so that will be played on the night,” Eileen explained.

When the club started out, members believed they had world-class facilities.

“When it was built in the 1960s, some of the members compared the community centre to Carnegie Hall. Unfortunately by the end, it was rat infested and in bad shape and it had to be knocked but the youth club then started fundraising for a new centre and were very involved in that,” she added.

The club spearheaded many worthwhile projects during its existence and young people in the parish got to travel throughout Europe.

“One of the things the club would do is to clean the road. One group would begin at one end of the parish and another group would start at the other end of the parish and they would pick up all the rubbish until they met in the middle. Then Denis Rynne, who had brought the idea from Australia, used to pick up the black bags. That was the deal. The club would gather the rubbish and he would collect it and the road was immaculate,” she added.

“The club would hunt the wren and have an old folks’ party and they went on trips to Dublin and Tramore and to Kilarney and then later, we joined a five-nations group and members got to travel to Southport in England and Mayobridge in Northern Ireland and to Holland and Germany and Spain. Being part of that group really expanded the group’s travel,” Eileen recalled.

“Throughout the years, members were in plays and in drama societies. They had their own play right after the club was formed. It was called Johnnie’s Britches. They travelled around the country during Lent performing it and it seemed to set the scene for the youth club itself,” she said.

“One of the novel things we did was sold the members of the youth Cclub into slavery. That was during the fundraising for the new hall. There was an auction and we made up all these funny rules like one was that slaves must be hosed down once a week. Then a person would buy the member of the club and get them to do little jobs like sweeping the yard and we would get the money and that went to the building of the new hall.”

Despite the various activities the club took part in, often it was the simpler things that resonated most with the young people involved.

“When we spoke to the members, right down through the years, the main thing that came across was that they didn’t care what it looked like. They went to meet their friends and have fun. The older members who are in their 60s remembered ‘we were watching Paul Newman in the movie Hustler with the pool table and we had one in Kilnamona Hall so it was like we were living the dream’. I just thought that was so cute,” Eileen said.

“Another theme that came up again and again was walking home. People just loved the walk home and they didn’t want to leave the club or each other’s company and people who lived in one direction would walk up a different road with other people going home so they didn’t miss any of the fun. That really was a theme that went down over the decades,” she commented.

While hundreds of people were involved in the youth club since it began, the institution of the youth club ceased to exist in Kilnamona in 2006. Eileen laments the end of the club but puts it down to the “dramatic fall in population”.

“We were looking at the Confirmation classes and in one group, there were four, the next was three. You couldn’t have a youth club. If one was gone, you couldn’t even have a game of five-a-side,” she concluded.
Between 130 and 170 people are expected to attend Saturday’s reunion in the Old Ground Hotel at 9pm.